Wasteland's Caress
by Kyilliki
Summary: When the ribbons fray and childhood fades, the monster will crawl through to join her kind. Renesmee and Alec: a figment in five parts.
1. The Burial of the Dead

**Wasteland's Caress**

**I: _The Burial of the Dead_  
**

-

Renegade, runaway Renesmee has turquoise nails, shorn short and ugly on her pianist's hands. The calluses there grate like salt-stained granite, but she wears gloves now and you will not tell.

-

When she turned her fishbone-spine and cinnamon-cardamom-spice curls away from her lace and grace childhood, her aunties were saddened, her uncles were grieved and her mamma and daddy turned into frantic, buzzing creatures.

It was rather amusing, but she didn't spit in their faces by laughing. They taught her etiquette, after all, even if that was the only wisdom their empty heads imparted.

Jacob… ah, Jacob.

Dogs had a way of being underfoot when you least liked it, and this one didn't run away, tail flapping with a bright bandanna around his neck, when she threw a stick and barked a command.

They'll find his body, under a bridge perhaps or in the curdled creek amidst ice and rubbish, but they'll never, never blame her.

Renesmee licked the blood off her leather jacket very, very carefully, you see.

-

One by one, Ren pushes vivid cards into machines that devour them with a click, regurgitating green paper that will cobble together her future. When there is nothing left under her hideous former title, she throws her wallet into the trash. The passport is kept, and the driver's license goes to a scrappy teenager who just might use it to buy booze.

Italy sounds pleasant, she decides. The monsters there could be taught a thing or two.

* * *

**Author's Note:** The chapter titles are taken from T. S Eliot's _The Waste Land._

This is unlike anything I've written, in style and tone. Please let me know what you think.


	2. A Game of Chess

**Wasteland's Caress**

**II: _A Game of Chess  
_**

-

"We will be glad to keep you, my darling Renesmee."

The papery creature smirks from his throne; the shadows and shades fill with the fluting laughter of his slaves.

"_Ren_," she hisses, because her true name is the worst obscenity, the final, lethal insult that even the Volturi will not be permitted to throw into her eyes.

"No, my pet, you do not have the right to demand. Not in your present state," Aro coos.

She glances at her peeling boots, inhales the fetid stench of mud and blood stiffening her hair into ringlets and sneers her defiance, until she sees the faceless guards drag a human in by the throat.

"Drink, cara mia," Aro orders, and a woman falls into her hands.

Ren gazes into those glossed eyes, darting like mad marbles on a crystal floor. There would be begging, she's sure, but you can't find the breath to do that when claws are digging into your carotid. She sees resemblance in those nothing-features and thinks of featherbrained Grandma Renee, of that kindly, overbearing professor she endured during a lonely semester in the University of Fucking Nowhere.

With a mad grin, she licks the peppermint balm off her own cracked lips, and plunges blunt little teeth into the woman's throat. Glorious blood drips down her chin in delicious rivulets, and this, _this_, Ren realizes, is the taste of pleasure-drenched sin.

When there is no more struggling, she strips skin and shatters ribs until a salty, silent heart sits in her palm.

She lets it fall at the feet of the thrones.

"Brava, my dear!" Aro cries, and applause steals the laughter from the shadows as she stands a slender victor.

* * *

**Author's Note:** The chapter title is once again taken from the names of sections in T. S Eliot's _The Waste Land._

Reviews are appreciated, and the rest should be updated tomorrow and the day after._  
_


	3. The Fire Sermon

**Wasteland's Caress**

**III: **_**The Fire Sermon**_

-

"Does it hurt?"

Jane is a mockery, a fiend behind a goddess' paper mask, wearing her jeans and scars like emblems of war.

"What the hell do you think?" The words scramble away, naked and raw, but Ren's spine is blue beneath faded cotton and the pain is glass and needles under her nails.

"Good. I hate your mother."

"Me too." She'd scratch away her eyes and the beat beneath her skin if she could, because they're the property and legacy of petal-skinned Bella, who receives everything and deserves just about none of it.

"Get up."

-

When Alec appears at her door, Ren assumes that he's been sent to test his gift on the mutant newcomer. Disasters, she figures, should come in pairs.

Instead, he looks at her with strange, corpse-light eyes and asks if he can taste her. _What the hell_, she thinks with the apathy of the undead, and offers him her throat, festooned with chains and beads that she couldn't bear to toss away in America.

The kisses dip and seek until she is splayed on the bed and Ren remembers that she comes from a flawed family, a line of women who unlock their hearts and thighs to men who are beautiful. The mistakes of the mother should not be repeated.

_He_ is not beautiful, and she has no heart. That's alright, then.

-

When dawn comes, Alec speaks before he departs.

"Your curls are lovely," he says, offhand.

Ren crops her hair as soon as she finds a rusted pair of scissors, until nothing is left but patches of auburn.

* * *

**Author's Note**: As always, the title of the chapter comes from T.S Eliot's_ The Waste Land._ The final two drabbles should be up by tomorrow evening.

Reviews are always appreciated.


	4. Death by Water

**Wasteland's Caress**

**IV: **_**Death by Water**_

-

"You know that I don't love you. Right?"

"Why does that matter?" Alec demands, and Ren is ashamed. Her Cullen heritage has gifted her with not only a name but a state of mind, it seems.

"I'm negotiating terms," she says lightly, because feigned logic comes easily to her in the sun, when her nails were shattered and torn on the planes of Alec's spine the previous night.

"You cannot. Experiments do not have that privilege."

She stands up in a spitting, hissing rage, swiping ginger tufts away from her eyes. The feral instinct calls for fists, but instead she claps her palms on both sides of Alec's face and shows him Jacob's death. She had no skills then, and no knowledge of anatomy. Her hands stank for days.

She shows no patience towards her disobedient lovers, you see.

-

The pet, the girl with the smeared past and bleary future scratches a place for herself from stone and from blood. She is a feeble guard, her edges tender and raw as scabbing scars, arbitrary and adolescent on any battlefield.

Instead, she offers her masters her gift, and weaves nightmares beneath her fingers. Occasionally, after all, there are wrongdoers who deserve nothing but cool drowning within their own heads.

Soon, her reputation for cruelty beyond measure, for madness-blackened vengeance exceeds that of Jane. Aro is pleased, and she likes to imagine her sugar spun once-family shivering.

Alec is proud, proud, proud; his kisses tumble and cling like wind-tossed snow.

* * *

**Author's Note:** As stated before, the chapter titles come from T.S Eliot's _The Waste Land_. I will keep mentioning this because the poem in question is wonderful.

The final chapter should be posted tomorrow. See you then.


	5. What the Thunder Said

**Wasteland's Caress**

**V. : _What the Thunder Said  
_**

-

"You don't think it's too much?" Ren drapes the necklace around her throat. It is nothing special, a scrap of ribbon and a crest, but it belonged to someone of import, once. Around her, ashes tumble like that fake snow crazy Auntie Alice sprinkled around the Christmas tree with rabid enthusiasm. She won't be doing that anymore.

"It's fine," Alec says, beneath his hood.

"You know me, I overaccesorize." She's formed a habit of taking from every victim, a bauble, a gem, a small precious thing, and wearing it like a military dog-tag on her neck.

"You can ask Heidi about battlefield chic on the flight back."

-

"Guess I'm stuck here now," Ren announces to nobody in particular, scuffing her garishly bright shoes as the rain drips and drizzles onto old stone. Her cloak smells like detergent now, and her clothes are Italian, cheerful and chosen by someone else.

"That would be the consequence of setting your former home on fire, yes," Alec agrees placidly. "What are you thinking of doing next?"

"We should get married. Settle down, get a puppy and name it Seth. Oh, and there have to be one point two goddamn kids. That's pretty important," she says, straight-faced. It takes some effort to keep the cynicism from seeping visibly through the cracks and wounds.

"Yeah. Something like that."

She kisses him then, hard and fast, like explosions and flying, flaying steel. The future, magnesium-bright, burning blue, unfurls itself in his mind, and Alec is laughing until he remembers pain.

Ren grins.

"Let's fucking rock this."

* * *

**Author's Note:** As always, credit for the chapter title goes to T.S Eliot. You're getting sick of hearing this, I'm sure.

This drabble completes my sojourn into the world of Alec/Renesmee. It's been wild. My thanks to everyone who read, favourited and reviewed.


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